The long-term average of annual precipitation in California won’t change much, they predicted. “Yet despite that, we see a big increase in extremes,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, lead author of a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. “We expect to see more really wet years and also more really dry years.” (UCLA’s Alex Hall was also cited.) [Also: Reuters, Wired, Bay Area News Group]

UCLA gymnast Christine Peng-Peng Lee’s focus was clear going into Saturday’s NCAA national championships at the Chaifetz Arena. “Right now, I have a job, and that job is to win national championships,” Lee said. Lee completed her job and then some, scoring a perfect 10 on her final event of the night, the balance beam, to give UCLA the title by .037 points over two-time defending champion Oklahoma.

Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who has studied the fight over gun rights, said such confrontational protests are familiar in abortion and animal rights activism but rare in this realm. “It is a sign of how gun-control activists are looking for any new avenues, with Congress deadlocked,” he said. “Gun-control activists are really pushing the envelope, trying any way they can.”

“If it’s all going to be done in a few weeks, why do you need experienced courtroom attorneys?” [Harry] Litman, now a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law, said. Trump, then, appears to be doing two things at the same time. On the surface, he’s conveying the impression that he believes the Russia investigation is winding down — but behind the scenes, he also seems to be lawyering up for a tough legal fight.

Among commonly expressed concerns — again, none of which have been clearly demonstrated — are unwanted changes in nutritional content, the creation of allergens and toxic effects on bodily organs. According to an interview in Scientific American with Robert Goldberg, a plant molecular biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, such fears have not yet been quelled despite “hundreds of millions of genetic experiments involving every type of organism on earth and people eating billions of meals without a problem.”

“There have been Latino agents, namely Mexican Americans, since the very beginning of Border Patrol,” said Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a UCLA professor and author of “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol.” “Of course, through the ‘70s really they were a minority, but they were actively recruited as early as the 1920s for their language abilities in particular.”

Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance and economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, said the future may not be as bleak as some think. “Technology will eliminate some jobs that are repetitive and require less human judgment,” he said. “But I think they will get replaced by other jobs that humans are better at. Anything that requires judgment is something humans will continue to do. We are not good at multiplying 16-digit numbers, but we’re good at judging people and detecting if someone is telling the truth.”

Benzodiazepines, which can treat anxiety, insomnia, seizures and other problems, “are widely used by patients and most of them probably do not realize how easy it is to accidentally overdose when they are also prescribed an opioid,” Dr. Joseph Ladapo of the University of California, Los Angeles, told Reuters Health. “I have taken care of patients who have been admitted to the hospital for exactly this reason,” he said by email, “and none of them seemed to know how risky it was to be concurrently using both benzodiazepines and opioids.”

“A rush to make this decision very quickly without that public deliberation, without a transparent process, doesn’t allow for the school board to forge that sense of common cause,” said UCLA’s John Rogers. [Audio download]

The research holds special interest for Emeran Mayer, MD, PhD, professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and executive director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, an internationally known expert on the interactions between the digestive and nervous systems and women’s health. “This study clearly established the clinical value of a mind-based intervention for IBS,” said Mayer. “The success of this research shows that this should be offered to patients not as a last resort but as a safe and effective first- or second-line therapy.”

Dr. Colin McCannel, a professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the medical director of the Stein Eye Center in Santa Monica, says such surgeries aren’t worth the risk. “There is a significant risk that an implant in the front of the eye will, in time, have problems. Inflammation, glaucoma, cataract, and need for a corneal transplant, as Ms. Bruna suffered, are what one would anticipate as complications,” McCannel told Healthline. “Worst-case scenario, she could have suffered an infection inside the eye, which could lead to loss of the eye altogether.”